Suzanna Reiss on Drug Control, Coca-Cola, and Pharmaceuticals
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
Release Date: 07/01/2015
Bench Ansfield on Arson-for-Profit, Insurance Brownlining, and the Bronx
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
Arson - which frequently involves the destruction of property - and business are not typically thought to be compatible. Indeed, there is a whole industry - the insurance industry - whose stated business is the mitigation of risk, including the risk of fire. Over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, fire insurance and fire prevention became untethered. This, combined with other developments, created the circumstances for arson to become profitable for some landlords. In this month's episode, guest Bench Ansfield details the local, national, and international circumstances...
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Kendra Boyd on Black Business and Racial Capitalism during the Great Migration
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
Take a moment and picture the average person who came North during the Great Migration. Chances are good that you conjured someone who was African-American and working-class, bound for a city in search of a job, say, in a factory or in domestic service. But as Kendra Boyd’s new book, Freedom Enterprise, reveals, the Great Migration also saw entrepreneurs moving to the urban North in search of opportunity. Once they arrived in places like Detroit, these businesspeople had to navigate a fraught landscape that was profoundly structured by race and racism. Today's episode tackles...
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Trish Kahle on Energy Citizenship and Coal-Fired Democracy in the 20th Century U.S.
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
What do energy consumers owe energy producers? What does it mean to be a citizen in a coal-fired democracy? In this month's episode, guest Trish Kahle reckons with the costs and benefits of coal from the perspective of American coal miners in Appalachia. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, Kahle outlines miners efforts to articulate and, later, revise a coal-fired social contract, one capable of delivering them the benefits of citizenship. Thus, Kahle shows how miners, throughout the 20th century, endeavored to leverage their position as energy producers to make claims on the U.S....
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Ian Kumekawa on Globalization As Told Through One Ship
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
How do you write the history of something as abstract, as placeless, and as vast as the globalization that has remade our world over the past several decades? If you’re Ian Kumekawa, you make those immaterial forces concrete by telling the story of one object: a hulking 94-meter-long steel barge he calls “The Vessel.” From housing for oil roughnecks in the North Sea, to a barracks for British soldiers in the Falklands, to a jail docked on a Manhattan pier, the Vessel reveals how the murky world of offshore capitalism is in fact embodied in tangible things. It always involves...
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Koji Hirata on Steel, Industrialization, and Chinese Socialism
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
This month's episode looks at the history of Chinese industrialization by focusing on Anshan Iron and Steel Works or Angang, located in Manchuria. Long portrayed as the quintessential model of Mao-era socialist industrialization, Angang, as Koji Hirata shows, was, in many ways, built on the material and ideological foundations laid by imperial Japan and nationalist China. Moving forward in time, Hirata analyzes Angang’s role in the making of socialist China, including revealing the relativley understudied political tensions that existed within China's largest state-owned enterprise (SOE)...
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LIVE! @ BHC 2025
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
It's now been over a decade since the New York Times declared that the history of capitalism was in full swing at American universities. This podcast also just celebrated its 10 year anniversary. With those milestones in mind, we wanted to take the temperature of the very folks driving the field forward into new and exciting directions. To do that, your co-hosts hit the road, interviewing attendees at the 2025 Business History Conference in Atlanta. Listen to find out what's on the mind of some of the leading historians in our field.
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Justene Hill Edwards on the Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
In this month's episode Justene Hill Edwards leads listeners on a deep dive into the rise and fall of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman's Bank. Among the topics explored are the bank's relationship to the similarly named Freedman's Bureau, the ways the bank’s administrators worked to gain African Americans’ trust, and, notably, how these same administrators betrayed African Americans’ trust by squandering, and, at times, outright stealing their savings to fuel their own risky ventures with longterm consequences for the racial wealth gap and African...
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Erik Baker on the Entrepreneurial Century
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
Back in high school, my social studies teacher—who was, of course, also the football coach—told my class that entrepreneurs were the heroes of American history. If we enjoyed a dynamic economy and good jobs, it was all thanks to their genius for innovation and risk-taking. And if we wanted to get ahead, he said, we’d need to foster the same sort of entrepreneurial spirit in ourselves. You are probably rolling your eyes right now. I certainly remember doing the same back in 10th grade. But Erik Baker’s new book, Make Your Own Job How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America,...
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Mary Bridges on Bankers and the Dawn of American Empire
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States’ global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world’s trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly—or sometimes quite explicitly. But as Mary Bridges argues, America’s financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges’ follows the foot...
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Seth Rockman on Slavery's Material History
Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast
A simple leather shoe. A scratchy shirt made of cotton or wool. A roughly-hewn axe. A leather whip, braided in New Jersey. Southern slavery did not just depend on an extractive economic system, or a highly-unequal racial and social order, or a brutal regime of labor exploitation—even though it needed all of those things. It also required a vast array of goods: real, tangible tools and garments that were usually made in the North and used in the South. Seth Rockman’s new book follows those everyday objects: from their production, to their sale, to their distribution and use...
info_outlineToday’s guest discusses the history of the coca leaf and the U.S. drug control regime. Amongst other topics, we discuss the importance of coca to both Coca-Cola and Merck and the pharmaceutical industry. For Suzanna Reiss, this provides a way to interpret the history of capitalism across the mid-twentieth century and after.
Suzanna Reiss is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is author of We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire. You can read more about her work here.
For our New York area listeners, we will be having a live conversation with our friends from Dissent Magazine’s Belabored Podcast.